Firefox market share drops as IE makes slender gain

But Chrome is the one to watch now

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Mozilla’s Firefox has lost market share against Google’s young pretender Chrome browser for the third month in a row.

According to NetMarketShare’s latest stats, Firefox's share of the global browser market slipped under 23 per cent in July.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer saw its usage share rise a slender 0.42 per cent last month. It’s up about one per cent since May, the stats firm noted.

“This is the second month in a row of global gains for Internet Explorer and the third straight month of gains for Internet Explorer 8 in the United States. The gain comes at the expense of Firefox (-.9%) and Chrome (-.08%),” said NetMarketShare.

Apple’s Safari broke the five per cent barrier for the first time this year after languishing around the 4.5 per cent mark for most of 2010.

Internet Explorer, down some five per cent on September 2009 figures, topped out the list with a 60.74 per cent worldwide market share for July.

Chrome saw a small dip in global usage last month, and currently stands at 7.16 per cent of browser usage globally.

But Google's own surfing tool's popularity has blossomed in little over a year since its launch. The browser jumped ahead of Safari to take the number three spot in December last year.

In effect, the current state of play in the browser wars remains pretty much unchanged, then. Down the line it’s fair to surmise that Chrome will make some gains, perhaps at the expense of Firefox. At the same time, it’s unlikely that IE usage will see any major drops or jumps either. ®